The three-year prison sentence given Wednesday to President Donald Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen — for a series of crimes he said he committed to “cover up” Trump’s “dirty deeds” out of “blind loyalty” — is a figurative if not literal indictment of the 45th president. It should go without saying that the Cohen situation should not be another issue in which reactions reflexively sort themselves out along partisan lines.

Sadly, of course, this is just such an issue.

Yes, the argument has been made that Trump’s payoffs to two alleged mistresses — which Manhattan federal prosecutors called clear campaign finance crimes and to which Cohen pleaded guilty — were similar to the hush money that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards arranged for his mistress, for which Edwards was not convicted. But as Above the Law lawyer-blogger Elie Mystal pointed out, “There was no tape of Edwards pretending to know nothing about the hush money payments that he himself ordered.” And there was no third party corroborating key details of one illegal payoff, as happened in this case with testimony from David Pecker, the media mogul who controls the National Enquirer’s parent company. Despite Trump’s claim this week that the payment he once disavowed was a “a simple private transaction,” Cohen first acknowledged in August that what he orchestrated at Trump’s direction was “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” What Edwards claimed to do for personal reasons — and not to benefit his campaign — was murkier.

Setting that aside, there is no way to explain away Cohen pleading guilty to lying to Congress about key details of his negotiations with Russian agents to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — at 100 stories it would have been the largest building in Europe — and about how much Trump was aware of and involved in these discussions. The president can tweet “NO COLLUSION” until his fingers fall off, but there is now direct evidence that as he was seeking the White House, he was trying to enrich himself by pulling off the Moscow deal — while not coming clean about the pursuit in what Cohen called Trump’s “political messaging.”

“All I can say is he is doing a good job as president,” Hatch added. “I don’t think he was involved in crimes, but even then, you know, you can make anything a crime under the current laws if you want to.” This is the Hatch who called Democratic President Bill Clinton “pathetic” and a “jerk” in 1998 after Clinton admitted to lying to the public about his sexual relationship with aide Monica Lewinsky and who voted to oust Clinton from office for perjury and obstruction of justice. CNN played a montage of GOP lawmakers with similarly blithe reactions.

Not all Republicans were so blasé. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, for one, declared Trump was not outside the law: “If someone has violated the law, the application of the law should be applied to them like it would to any other citizen in this country, and obviously if you’re in a position of great authority like the presidency that would be the case.”

What happens from here seems predictable. It’s hard to believe that nearly all of theHouse’s Democratic majority won’t vote to impeach Trump at some point in 2019. And it’s just as hard to believe enough of the Senate’s Republican majority would join Senate Democrats to hit the 67-vote threshold to convict him and remove him from office.

It could be, as some legal experts assert, that Trump could be charged with crimes when he leaves office. It could also be he escapes criminal liability if re-elected. That means voters will judge him first.